Friday, June 9

Rejoice, rejoice.

You know, the Archbishop of Canterbury made this point. He said that the terrorists and the United States Air Force were both equivalent. They were only capable of viewing people at a distance. The guy in the plane, with all those anonymous buildings as little blips on the radar screen, on the GPS positioning thing way below him, he has more understanding of the humanity there. He knows which is the schoolhouse. He knows which is the hospital. He knows which is the restaurant. And he knows which is the one building he's allowed to hit. What's interesting to me about the people we're up against is they look you in your eyes. Zarqawi can look American hostages, British hostages ... poor Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi aid worker ... he can look these people in the eye and he fails to recognize their common humanity, and he reaches for his scimitar, and he cuts their throat.

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I think the correct attitude is that of Mrs Thatcher when the British troops liberated South Georgia, an outlying island of the Falklands, from the Argentinian forces. And the newsmen were asking her all these silly questions, and she just said to them, gentlemen, just rejoice, rejoice. And rejoice, rejoice is what any sane human being ought to have done to the news that Zarqawi has been dispatched.

yes, the most dangerous and most horrible terrorist in the world — and I don't exempt Mr bin Laden from this — I mean, the vilest of the lot, is dead. And if the defeatists had been listened to, he would by now be the most famous Muslim warrior in the history of the world. They keep telling us that only by fighting these people do we give them credibility and make them powerful and so forth, that we create them. This is a complete lie. If we had retreated from Iraq, Zarqawi would have claimed victory over a superpower, and his name would be on T-shirts. In bazaars of illiterate, unfortunate, Muslim children all across the world, he'd be a hero. Instead, he's dog meat, which is what he ought to have been a long time ago.

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the Iranians are secretly helping someone whose public program is the massacre of Shiia Muslims — in other words, of their co-religionists — that their anti-Americanism is so intense, and so sickened, sorry, so sick, that they'll even collaborate with someone who regards them as a vile, heretic, scumbag faction.

Ken was just one of a multitude of innocent people killed by that man. He was a monster. Personally, I would rather have seen him captured and made to stand in the dock and face justice for what he's done. But I won't lose any sleep over him being dead. I'm not worried that he's gone.

No one behind him had the kind of charisma and operational intellect that he brought to the table. Our hope is no one can step in, and you end up with fragmentation and perhaps dissension among his followers.